A 6-year-old girl in Miami stopped her own theft by biting the person who tried to take her, The Miami Police Department says.
An arrest affidavit shows that Leonardo Venegas was picked up by police on Saturday in connection with the attempted kidnapping. He was accused of stealing and hurting a child.
According to the affidavit, the child and her brothers were playing in the courtyard of their Miami apartment complex on Thursday when they saw a white SUV near their apartment.
The affidavit shows that after her brothers went inside, the 6-year-old girl sat on the back stairs of her apartment. Suddenly, the suspect, whose name is Leonardo Venegas, grabbed her.
Police say that Venegas picked up the child and tried to take her away, but she bit him on the arm, causing him to drop the child. The statement says that Venegas hit the child and ran toward the front of the apartment building.
“I bit him,” the 6-year-old told WPLG, which is an ABC News station in Miami.
“He picked me up and then slapped me,” she told the station. “He then threw me to the ground and ran away.”
According to the statement, the 6-year-old girl ran to the front of the building and told her aunt what had happened.
Police in Miami said that surveillance video showed a white Range Rover driving into the apartment complex and the suspect walking to the back of the complex, where the 6-year-old was sitting, on stairs.
The tweet below verifies the news:
A 6-year-old girl thwarted her own kidnapping outside her home after she bit the attacker, police say. https://t.co/wJ1C9mH0J3
— ABC News (@ABC) July 12, 2023
Miami police say the victim confirmed that the man seen on the CCTV video was the same person who tried to kidnap her.
According to the arrest record, police found the white SUV at a Miami home and then arrested Venegas.
ABC News asked Venegas’s lawyer for a response, but the lawyer did not respond right away.
In May, a 6-year-old girl in Daytona Beach, Florida, was almost taken when she and her mother were going home from church on Mother’s Day. This is what the Daytona Beach Police Department said.
The child and her mother were walking home together from Our Lady of Lourdes Church when a woman stopped them, according to a story that WFTV got.
The woman then “intentionally grabbed” the 6-year-old, the report said, to try to get the girl away from her mother. When all else failed, the subject ran away.
In March, Jamaal Germany, who is 30 years old, reportedly tried to take a student from a bus stop in Gaithersburg, Maryland, where the student was waiting for their school bus. This is according to the Montgomery County Police Department.
The Montgomery County Detention Center says that Germany is still in jail and that his next court date is in September. Information about his plea wasn’t released right away.
Police say a group of kids who came to the victim’s aid stopped the attempted kidnapping attempt.
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